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Tag Archives: Jeff Dyer

Jeff Dyer, Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University

Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center

From Forbes

Most innovation rankings are popularity contests based on past performance or editorial whims. We set out to create something very different with the World’s Most Innovative Companies list, using the wisdom of the crowd. Our method relies on investors’ ability to identify firms they expect to be innovative now and in the future. You can learn more about our research on innovation at The Innovator’s DNA website.

Companies are ranked by their innovation premium: the difference between their market capitalization and the net present value of cash flows from existing businesses (based on a proprietary algorithm from Credit Suisse HOLT). The difference between them is the bonus given by equity investors on the educated hunch that the company will continue to come up with profitable new growth.

To be included, firms need seven years of public financial data and $10 billion in market cap. (Facebook, for example, would rank high on the list if we used only the data since they went public.) We include only industries that are known to invest in innovation, excluding industries that have no measurable investment in R&D, so banks and other financial services don’t make the list. Nor do energy and mining firms, whose market value is tied more to commodity prices than innovation. Big caveat: Our picks do not correlate with subsequent investor returns. To the extent that today’s share price embeds high-growth expectations, one might even anticipate low returns to investors, as these expectations may be difficult to meet.

We use something called the Innovation Premium to compile our list. It is calculated first by projecting the cash flows a company produces from its existing businesses without any growth and look at the net present value (NPV) of those cash flows. We compare this base value of the existing business with the company’s current total Enterprise Value (EV): Companies with an EV above their base value have an innovation premium built into their stock price. You can read a more detailed explanation of our work around innovative companies and leaders in our book The Innovator’s DNA (Harvard Business Press, 2011), written with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. The following steps outline this approach in greater detail: